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Atlas 5 is already completely obsoleted by the Falcon Heavy which costs about half as much, for a reusable launch, and carries about 3x as much. But for Starsh
by somenameforme 3y ago
Atlas 5 is already completely obsoleted by the Falcon Heavy which costs about half as much, for a reusable launch, and carries about 3x as much.
But for Starship, most people don't seem to realize what a potential game changer this is. The goal for Starship is to get costs down to about 15x less than Falcon Heavy. When you can start sending stuff to space for a few dollars per pound, we're not talking about just probes, but rather opening the door to the complete commercialization and exploitation of space.
Such an exponential jump (downward) in prices would also largely end the only-for-the-super-rich phase of space we're currently in. You could be doing a flyby around the Moon for what you might spend on a holiday to Asia, in the very foreseeable future. That's what makes Starship so tantalizing. If it succeeds - this is a revolutionary step forward for space. Of course, there's no guarantee that it will succeed, but it increasingly looks like it will!
- misiti3780 3y agoAlso, wont it theoretically speed up and decrease international shipping + travel. We should be able to go from the US to Japan in an hour or two in the future.
- Sanzig 3y agoI am pretty skeptical of Starship ever getting used for suborbital transportation, other than maybe for ultra-elite VIP transport or something like a rapid deployment system for military special forces. It seems highly unlikely they will ever get the price down to where it can compete with commercial airliners, and Concorde's commercial failure showed us that people will happily choose cheap subsonic flight over fast supersonic flight. You can get almost anywhere on Earth in 36 hours' notice with conventional jet travel relatively cheaply on 1-2 weeks of US median income for a return ticket - that sweet spot of speed and cost is hard to beat.
- deprecative 3y agoWatch Elon call it something like Airship and have it be fit for tens to hundreds of people per launch with no need for a pilot (though one may be present). It'd take twenty years to get to market, sure, but hey that's progress.
- rbanffy 3y agoGetting it to airline-level safety will take at least that much, unless they start flying multiple times a day without any anomalies whatsoever.
- njarboe 3y agoI think there is a pretty large market for a trip to space and an hour flight from LA to New Zealand, New York-Sydney, London-Shanghai, etc. for $10-20k. What an amazing combination that would be.
- rbanffy 3y agoAdd a couple hours for the trip between town and pad, security and so on. Still it's 3-4 hours.
- lupusreal 3y agoI don't think there are many cities that have suitable launch sites near them. It's unlikely they'll ever get approval to launch over populated areas, or even from most populated coastal locations. Also, the issue of getting boosters to all of these destinations seems like a problem. Planes don't split in two and have half return to the launch site but Starships do. So you could land the upper stage in Tokyo, but then what? How do you get a booster there for the return journey? Personally I doubt they'll even use these to bring people to orbit anytime soon. I think they're purpose built for launching massive LEO constellations.
- njarboe 3y agoOff shore platforms. Most large cities are on or near an ocean or large lake.
- dotnet00 3y agoYeah the short term approach for crewed Starship seems likely to involve transporting crew to a Starship once it is already in orbit and vice versa for return.
- sebzim4500 3y agoYou'd probably have to launch from international waters, after taking a boat/helicopter. >Also, the issue of getting boosters to all of these destinations seems like a problem You launch them, presumably.
- AlgorithmicTime 3y agoHalf the point of special forces is to be covert, which is made hard when your transportation is a giant rocket streaking through the suborbital zone.
- Sanzig 3y agoBut imagine the PsyOps impact of the enemy looking up and seeing the US raining down literal ODSTs on them ;) Realistically, they'd be dropping into an allied base in-theatre with a pad able to support a Starship landing, and then taking conventional means the rest of the way. Of course, I suspect that when it comes to "drop operators from space" vs. "train extra operators who can be forward deployed," the latter is probably going to be way more cost efficient. Would make for a cool movie though.
- PBnFlash 3y agoWorth noting that flying to the equator can provide a pretty significant increase of payload mass. Just a quick layover to orbit.
- TMWNN 3y ago>Concorde's commercial failure I thought Concorde failed commercially because it couldn't get approval to fly over the US elsewhere over land because of sonic booms. I know reentering spacecraft cause sonic booms but thought that they occur high enough to not cause the same problems on the ground.
- pests 3y agoNot just a boom or booms, a continuous boom along its travel.
- lmm 3y ago> I thought Concorde failed commercially because it couldn't get approval to fly over the US elsewhere over land because of sonic booms. Or, if you're more cynical, because the US' own supersonic airliner failed and they wouldn't let those Euros show them up.
- philwelch 3y agoThe American SST was cancelled because of the sonic boom problem.
- lmm 3y agoIt was cancelled because Boeing were late and over budget; by the time they started work on a prototype, Concorde was already being shown at airshows, and the US Senate voted to stop throwing more money at them. Sonic booms were at most one contributing factor among many to that senate vote.
- philwelch 3y agoConcorde was also late and over budget. And until Congress defunded the 2707, it had more pending orders from more airlines than Concorde did. Sonic booms weren’t the only reason for the cancellation but they were probably the single biggest reason. Also, Concorde wasn’t even the first supersonic airliner—that was the Tupolev Tu-144.
- kevin_thibedeau 3y agosub-orbital military applications would be risky as they'd look like an ICBM launch to other nuclear powers. Commercial rockets depend on advance public disclosure of launch dates to stave off WW3 from itchy trigger fingers.
- dghlsakjg 3y agoMaybe. The fundamental physics involved in suborbital flights mean that you are likely experiencing sustained acceleration of 3+ Gs minimum. That is a lot, something near the max g force of a roller coaster but lasting for minutes. Combine that with the launch/landing zones needing to be many miles from anything, and it isn't really ready for primetime. Just for reference 1.3 Gs is the max sustained load you will feel in a regular airliner, very rarely 1.5 Gs for terrain avoidance. For cargo, maybe medical stuff like moving organ donations around, but largely I can't imagine a ton of use cases where getting something to an antipode in 3 or 4 hours is that much more valuable than getting it there in 19 hours. Then again, maybe I lack imagination.
- philwelch 3y agoSo not only do I get there hours sooner, but the ride itself is more fun?
- ghufran_syed 3y agoIf you’re a military unit about to get wiped out by an enemy force due to running out of ammo, I imagine getting 100 tons of ammo in 1 hour vs in 19 hours would be a big difference?
- dghlsakjg 3y agoThe scenario where you have access to a space launch system, and an LZ at the front, and abundant supplies on the opposite side of the earth, but your logistics have failed to keep supplies in theater doesn't exist. Forces that run out of ammo don't have access to cutting edge ICBMs is a rule that I would bet money on.
- Covzire 3y agoMini-factories in space could become a thing, supposedly a lot of industrial processes are only difficult because of friction and gravity.
- colechristensen 3y agoAsteroid mining I think is one of the most interesting initial space industries. Something silly like a single asteroid having metals with current valuations of a million times the global GDP. Obviously you can't sell for that much but asteroid mining could make a lot of commodities become insanely cheap, and that would enable some pretty amazing things here at home, and in space. Like what if steel were cheaper than plastic? If there was enough of it around to build a bridge between New York and London? If you could build a ship the size of Manhattan and then a city on top of it to roam the oceans? If you could build entire cities in orbit or city-ships that slowly wandered the solar system.
- TMWNN 3y ago>Asteroid mining I think is one of the most interesting initial space industries. I hope to see in my lifetime a large asteroid brought to Earth orbit, for both mining and as a very large space station.
- Geisterde 3y agoA large space station is an interesting idea, or a long range station!
- mjevans 3y agoYes, send up the robot miners. Plow the results onto the moon a safe but close distance to a base. Manufacture parts in lower G and far easier vacuum (it's super useful for MANY industrial things). Possibly even use solar collector ovens to melt/cook. Returning bulk products to earth might not be viable in the short term, but this could really bootstrap what we do off planet and I'm hopeful it might eventually make space elevators viable which would open a lot of options.
- pfdietz 3y ago> ending stuff to space for a few dollars per pound That's about what it costs to fly freight across an ocean.
- thereisnospork 3y agoThat begs an interesting comparison in fuel usage (kJ or $ basis): supplying dV for one pound to orbit vs. the energy required to perform the work needed to overcome ~8,000 miles of marginal drag from +1lb of cargo on a ship. Fuel usage being the limiter of terminal economics once launch systems are commodified to the degree ships are.
- pfdietz 3y agoIt's important to note that most of the propellant is not fuel, it's liquid oxygen. And LOX is the second cheapest industrial liquid (after water). As for the fuel itself, natural gas is much cheaper than jet fuel per unit of combustion energy.
- euroderf 3y agoFor that price I'd send up a partially-eaten block of cheese, just because I can.
- newzisforsukas 3y ago> When you can start sending stuff to space for a few dollars per pound, we're not talking about just probes, but rather opening the door to the complete commercialization and exploitation of space. It almost sounds too good to be true or something.
- jibe 3y agoIt’s not uncommon to see much bigger improvements in cost than what SpaceX is targeting. E.g., solar. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-pv-prices https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-pv-prices
- somenameforme 3y agoMost of what SpaceX has already achieved has sounded similarly, but costs were so astronomical to begin with that it didn't make any immediate difference to most people. So for instance the Space Shuttle was only retired in 2011. After all was said and done it ended up costing $1.6 billion per launch - about $30,000 per pound of payload. The Falcon Heavy costs about $0.1 billion (in reusable mode) and brought the costs down to less than $700/lb. That's a greater than 40x reduction in costs, which sounds too good to be true - but the problem is that even at $700/lb, that's still far too expensive to do anything remotely interesting. But take that down again and suddenly everything changes and we, more or less instantly, enter into an entirely new stage in human development and history. It'll be akin to the automobile. Henry Ford didn't make the first automobile, but he did make the first commercially affordable one. And, in the blink of an eye, society permanently changed because of it. --- As a fun aside, when doing a web search to grab the numbers above somehow this [1] ended up in the search results. It's from 2012 and somebody pondering SpaceX's wild claims of being able to get costs below $1,100 per kg ($1,500 inflation adjusted). [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3992936 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3992936
- TMWNN 3y ago>So for instance the Space Shuttle was only retired in 2011. After all was said and done it ended up costing $1.6 billion per launch - about $30,000 per pound of payload. The Falcon Heavy costs about $0.1 billion (in reusable mode) and brought the costs down to less than $700/lb. Is that an apples-to-apples comparison? Each shuttle launch cost $1.5 billion when including development cost (that is, $200 billion in total spending on the STS program / 135 launches); as your link discusses, the incremental cost per launch was "merely" $450-500 million. The $0.1 billion figure per Falcon Heavy launch is only the incremental cost since we don't know how much Falcon Heavy cost to develop (And how to account for the Falcon 9 development costs that Heavy is heavily based on?). Obviously Falcon 9/Heavy has every potential for launching far more times than the shuttle, further reducing the development cost allocated to each launch (or at least, until Starship gets going I guess). But we ought to be as accurate as possible in comparing Falcon and STS.
- TMWNN 3y ago>Atlas 5 is already completely obsoleted by the Falcon Heavy which costs about half as much, for a reusable launch, and carries about 3x as much. Which is why the rocket has been discontinued. This is also why Boeing Starliner is dead man walking. Starliner is only certified for Atlas 5, and there are enough spare boosters for the launches NASA contracted with Boeing for, no more. The consensus is that Boeing will fulfill the contract then that'll be the end of Starliner, which is great for Boeing in the sense that it'll finally close that money-leaking wound, but not great for NASA because the whole point of Starliner + Crew Dragon was to have two separate US-owned ways to send people into space.[1] Even if Starship passes every test going forward ahead of schedule and gets man-rated, NASA would prefer to not have one company provide both methods, but I don't know what would be a better alternative. Sierra finally gets that big contract to man-rate Dream Chaser? Blue Origin? [1] Setting aside how everyone at the time believed that Starliner would be the first one into orbit
- dotnet00 3y agoThere is still the possibility of either New Glenn or Vulkan being crew rated to carry Starliner. With Vulkan the concern was mainly that no one was willing to foot the bill, but with the rumored acquisition of ULA by Blue Origin, there's a chance they might want Starliner as their own crew vehicle. The main limitation being that Boeing has already shutdown Starliner production, only making the 2 needed for the ISS contract. So even if anyone else wanted them, they'd have to put in a bunch of money to restart production. Putting all those costs together it might just become better to do something else, e.g. crew rate Dreamliner. That said, right now it's kind of up in the air, since as it stands, Dragon's second crew contract and Starliner's existing contract are likely to cover all remaining ISS launches. So what's needed afterwards depends on the commercial space stations NASA is pushing for.
- adolph 3y ago> Starliner is only certified for Atlas 5 I'm not certain what is meant by "certified" because it still hasn't made a human flight test yet. Notwithstanding the retirement of Atlas and Delta, Starliner was intended to be compatible with multiple launch vehicles, including the ULA Atlas V and Delta IV, and the SpaceX Falcon 9 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_Starliner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_Starliner
- tedmcory77 3y ago"for a few dollars per pound" - Thank you. I hadn't realized their goals were that ambitious.